As John Schneider takes the Blue Jays through his second spring training as manager, he understands the stakes of the season to come.
“The time is now,” the 44-year-old said in a deep and wide-ranging conversation that can be heard on the current edition of Deep Left Field, the Star’s baseball podcast. “There’s no getting around that. The window with a few players that we have gets smaller and smaller every year 鈥 We have a really, really good team and we have to figure out a way to get over the hump.”
The Florida native has been a lightning rod for the frustration of fans after the team’s quick exits from the post-season the last two years. The Jays聽blew a seven-run lead in getting eliminated by Seattle in 2022, and there was the controversial decision last year to remove Jos茅 Berr铆os in the fourth inning of the last game the Jays played, a 2-0 loss in Minnesota.
“I’ve learned in this job that it’s easy to be scrutinized,” Schneider said. “It’s easy to be the bad guy, it’s easy to (be the one who people) point blame at and I think that just comes with the territory. What I think people don’t understand is how invested I am in this organization, this city and this country, and I don’t take that for granted.”
Schneider has been with the Jays longer than anyone else currently with the organization, in terms of consecutive service. He was drafted in the 13th round in 2002 by the J.P. Ricciardi regime. Pete Walker was claimed off waivers from the New York Mets a month earlier, but eventually made stops in Japan and with the New York Yankees before returning.
Walker remembers being a pitcher throwing to Schneider, then a minor-league catcher, more than 20 spring trainings ago. Now he’s Schneider’s pitching coach in the big leagues.
“Obviously, at the time, nobody really knows where they’re really going to be in the future, but he has always been a student of the game,” Walker said. “He’s someone who just lives and dies for baseball and really enjoys being around the field and the guys and talking baseball. He’s always been that kind of guy.”
After retiring as a player in 2007 with a .206 career batting average, Schneider went right into coaching, working his way up the ladder through the Jays’ system. When Walker returned as a minor-league coach, he was impressed.
“We were in meetings together and you could tell he was on top of things,” said Walker, who is heading into his 11th season as the big-league pitching coach. “He was running things down here in the Gulf Coast League. He seemed to be someone who was very organized, on top of things, had a strong personality that players respected.”
DeMarlo Hale joined the Jays in 2013, working as John Gibbons’ bench coach after managing nine seasons in the minors, then coaching another seven in the majors under Terry Francona and Buck Showalter. Part of his job was co-ordinating spring training and Schneider, as a minor-league manager, was one of Hale’s charges during spring.
“The one thing that struck me was that I could trust him to run (drill) stations,” Hale said. “To make sure that certain fundamentals and thoughts with the stations are being said and reminded for the players. I hated to lose him when it was toward the end (of spring training and he had to leave for minor-league camp to join his team).”
Closer Jordan Romano was on several of Schneider’s minor-league teams.
“I had him (as a manager) in Lansing, Dunedin and New Hampshire,” said the Markham, Ont. native, who has had back-to-back 36-save seasons. “We’ve been together a long time. He was on all those buses with us, he was grinding it out with the rest of us. I know what he’s been through and how hard he’s worked to get to that position and he knows how hard we work.”
Schneider is grateful to Hale for taking him under his wing back then.
”(Hale) was the guy as I was coming up through the system as a minor-league coach,” Schneider said. “He was always including me in spring training, taught me a lot about communicating with players.”
The 62-year-old baseball lifer was just paying it forward.
“People did it for me and I think it helped me,” Hale said. “Jimy Williams, when I was over in Boston, kind of gave you responsibility with big-league players to see how you reacted. And (Schneider) held himself very well. Just his response, reaction, I knew he was prepared, and he’s done a great job.
“I wouldn’t say he was under my wings because he made his own flight.”
It is one that has taken Schneider all the way up the organization.
“For this to be the only team that I’ve ever known in such a crazy industry where guys are moving around all the time, it’s something that I will never take for granted,” Schneider said.
“I’ve been through different front offices, different regimes, different roles and I tried to evolve along the way, but this is what I know. My kids know the Blue Jays, my wife knows the Blue Jays, my family knows the Blue Jays because that’s all I know.
“This is as big a part of my life as anything else that I care dearly about and I want nothing more than to be the guy who can say we got a title back in Canada.”
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